At the second annual Eat Local Farm Tour last weekend, the Ross sisters from Bloomington — Hannah, 8, and Kyrie, 9 — raced ahead of their parents to feed sheep, chase chickens and pet a cat at Shepherd’s Way Farms south of Northfield, Minn.

“We are trying to eat organic and eat local as much as possible, and it’s important for us to instill that in them,” Vanessa Ross said of her daughters.

As Hannah picked up a loose gray chicken feather and showed it off to Mark Ross, her dad, Jodi Ohlsen Read stepped out of her cheese-making building to tell the audience what happens at her 83-acre farm.

She pointed to where pastured pigs eat acorns and apples (as well as standard feed) and where they lay under shade trees.

“One is named Bacon,” said Ohlsen Read, coaxing a chuckle from her gallery.

The Eat Local Farm Tours, which were started by Mississippi Market in St. Paul and other co-op grocers, have attracted more than 1,000 people in two years and are one sign of a growing interest in “agri-tourism” — events to showcase agriculture and drive sales of farm-raised products.

The last Census of Agriculture, in 2009, showed 367 Minnesota farms offered agri-tourism or recreation services, generating about $8 million a year in income, according to the University of Minnesota Extension Service. This year’s census is expected to show an uptick in agri-tourism offerings, said Ryan Pesch, an extension educator based in Moorhead.

“What I’ve seen grow a lot in the last four years are the number of what I call informal farm-hosted events,” said Pesch. “It’s so common now for someone that operates a CSA (community-supported agriculture) or sells at a farmers’ market to have an open house, a picking day during the season or a fall dinner or fall feast.”

DIGGING IN

At Shepherd’s Way, the visitors peppered Ohlsen Read with questions about her craft of turning lamb milk into artisan cheeses: Can you milk any sheep? What do you feed them in winter? How much of the year can they produce milk? Do you ever get a vacation?

Ohlsen Read handles cheese production, marketing and public relations; her husband, Steven Read, cares for the animals and the land. Their four boys and two employees chip in.

“I get calls or emails every week from people wanting to make cheese with me,” Ohlsen Read said.

“No, you don’t,” she replies, saying more time is spent cleaning to meet U.S. Department of Agriculture protocols than actually making cheese.

Ohlsen Read shares how time can be consumed by waiting for a small engine to be repaired or wavering about creating a Twitter account. Then, there was the raccoon who recently ravaged the laying hens or the arsonist who set the farm ablaze, killing hundreds of sheep in 2005. Shepherd’s Way is slowly recovering, she said.

“Living in the city, you can romanticize it,” said Kailyn Spencer of Minneapolis. “But coming out here is a good way to see how it’s done. … You learn how slow-going it can be.”

Jessa and Tom Dittberner of St. Paul learned what they needed to feel comfortable about buying their first piece of meat since becoming vegetarians about a year ago.

“We were looking for meat we can feel good about,” Jessa Dittberner said. They bought a chicken to roast for dinner at Simple Harvest Farm Organics, also near Northfield.

“The chickens have a bigger house than ours,” Tom Dittberner said.

GROWING INTEREST

The local tour, which featured 10 farms, is based on a tour that started with a handful of farms in the Florida Panhandle and southern Georgia in 2008. In October, 33 farms will participate in the Florida-Georgia tour.

Kari Binning of Mississippi Market anticipates the local tour will grow, too, but she hopes at a slower clip. It could expand into western Wisconsin or into a full weekend. “We have a really rich environment here,” Binning said. “We are lucky. I would like to give people more options to go out there and visit more farms.”

Ohlsen Read wasn’t sold on the concept of farming before she and her husband moved to their first farm in 1995, in Carver, Minn.

“Set aside what you know about farming,” she recalled her husband saying. “What would you like to do?”

Her answer: share the farm with others. Ohlsen Read’s desire meshes with what her competitors are offering. She said nearly all the artisan cheese-makers she knows offer some form of agri-tourism. It varies from hosting an annual open house to running a bed-and-breakfast.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Minnesota Grown directory has remained steady, with about 60 offerings of tours or other agri-tourism activities in the past five years. But that soon could change.

“The experience has definitely become part of what is going on at these kind of farms,” said Paul Hugunin of Minnesota Grown. “A strong reason is that this is a family activity that you can do together. … It can be hard to find a family activity that everyone can participate in that you can feel good about as a parent.”

The initials in family-run L&R Poultry and Produce stand for Leo and Rae Rusnak. During the tour of their wooded farm in Kenyon, Minn., Leo was the 10-year-old boy holding a plastic toy gun and garbage can as a pretend shield; Rae was the mother-farmer-tour guide.

As people meandered from the poultry sheds to the garden patch, one couple talked about how informative the tour was. “The (farmers) are so passionate,” added Chere Bork, a nutritionist from Eden Prairie.

After the tour, Rusnak answered a question about genetically modified crops and then dipped out of sight to bottle more maple syrup for visitors.

Andy Greder covers the Gophers and Minnesota United for the Pioneer Press. Since joining the paper full time in November 2013, he has also covered the Timberwolves as a beat and spot duty from the Vikings to high schools. He was a part-time breaking news reporter at the Pioneer Press from 2011-13, when he was also a freelance writer and organic farmer. He started at the Duluth News Tribune in 2006, covering sports, news and business until living abroad in 2010.

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